ASCII Sector is a space trading game written completely using ASCII graphics. It is available from www.asciisector.net. There are Windows and Linux versions. This is a post I made on the forum over there explaining how I got this to run in a 64bit environment.

Hello All, I thought I would tell you a story of how I got this running on my 64bit Ubuntu (since I didn’t at a glance see anything tho help me out with this).

First, I’m running a 64bit install of Mythbuntu that I converted to a regular Ubuntu desktop a few months after the install.

I downloaded and installed ASCII Sector as described in the instructions. When I ran the file, I would get the error:bash: ./asciisec: No such file or directory

Of course, this made no sense since I was at the location of the file. I made sure I had libsdl and libsdl mixer installed, but that didn’t help. So I went browsing around, and found a post that said that this error was common when running 32bit apps on a 64bit install, and than installing the 32bit libraries would help. So I ran this command:sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

This installed the libraries for me, and when I ran it, I no longer got that error (Yah!) I got this one instead (boo):./asciisec: error while loading shared libraries: libsmpeg-0.4.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So, I used Synaptic to ensure that I had libsmpeg installed and I did. So, I did an strace on the process to see where it was looking for the file. Then I ran the find command to see where it was:sudo find / -name "libsmpeg*"
And it wasn’t looking where it was located. So I tried to create a symlink to a path it was looking in, but that didn’t work either. I got this error:./asciisec: error while loading shared libraries: libsmpeg-0.4.so.0: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

So I was back to the drawing board.

I did more searching, and came across a ubuntu 64bit gaming post referring to the getlibs application that installs 32bit compatible libs on 64 bit system. Here is that post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=662770&page=6 I downloaded getlibs from here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=474790 installed it, and then ran this command:getlibs -l libsmpeg-0.4.so.0
The program works similar to apt-get and downloaded the library and installed it. Then I ran asciisec and I was in the game. (real Yah!) I didn’t actually get to play it yet, but I imagine it will work fine now that it is all loaded up.

I’ve played a little bit, and it is a pretty fun game. I hope to make some quests for it in the future.